Counterpoint: Google already gives priority to recency, and it heavily rewards "flip shop" sites that essentially plagiarize existing content. The original researchers/authors who did the leg work get buried in lazy rewrites.
Due credit is not the only thing misplaced; the author who did the legwork is also, by virtue of their legitimate interest in their subject, a better prose stylist. Interesting, readable writing has to be more relevant to a search query than what the content farm produces.
I assume this is reddit trying to game the recency metric.
Another consequence of the redesign, much worse than useless dates, is that you get completely useless results just because the same "related post" (the title of which Google happens to deem "relevant") appears over and over again at the bottom of different pages.
To get around this you can search for "site:old.reddit.com" or "site:i.reddit.com". One downside is you get fewer results.
The open web made you rich, please help keep it open.
Funny how they don't seem to actually enforce that rule on the big guys gaming the index...
I also wish it was possible to be very specific with the recency selector. I want to be able to say: I want to search for stuff that showed up in this month 5 years ago, because I know it was news then.
As a user I would prefer to be the judge of what is relevant. If the results aren't what I'm looking for, then I'll modify the query until they are.
Having the search engine make these opaque decisions on what it thinks I meant to search makes it feel like playing a game of Peggle, where I have no idea if what I'm going for will be what I get.
Funny you should mention that workflow, because Google highly values reducing the number of times users have to do that kind of iteration. If they can work out what you actually mean and give you that first time, they count it as a win and stick with that approach.
> Having the search engine make these opaque decisions on what it thinks I meant to search makes it feel like playing a game of Peggle, where I have no idea if what I'm going for will be what I get.
I think on average this kind of "semantic search" works out for the better, for most people, most of the time.
I tend to like precise results too, but I often appreciate Google applying its "magic," so I'm not sure Google running in a "all magic suppressed" mode by default would be better. E.g. I recently searched for help with an issue I'm having with my refrigerator. I searched for "Samsung BLAHBLAHBLAH drawer freezing" where BLAHBLAHBLAH was my fridge's model number. The search results included stuff for other similar Samsung refrigerators, which are all very similar, so the results were quite relevant to my problem.
Yes, but sometimes it's explicitly NOT relevant. Different models differ.
What's infuriating is that searching for "Samsung MODELFOO drawer" IN QUOTES doesn't even return the right thing. The spam bots win this race nearly every time. TFA gives several reasons but doesn't address the core issue that searching for something in quotes often only shows unrelated garbage that just happened to be SEOd to hell. To beat this "new solution", a page needs just to include a bunch of pixel images with all the samsung models in the alt text.
Let's say that maybe before this "magic" was introduced, people needed to refine their search a few times but eventually got what they needed. But now, the majority gets a relevant result on the first time, but a few percent of searches don't go anywhere because you can't find a way to trick the AI and people eventually give up. You've improved your average metric, but arguably the search is worse since a few cases fail completely, when before they took just a bit more effort.
HN users need to understand: You are not a representative demographic. If they include results that only include words you typed, Google search will objectively degrade for the majority of non-HN folks. Even I sometimes find what I'm looking for because I didn't know the correct words, but Google presented me with docs with words of similar meaning.
As dannysullivan pointed out, Google is providing you with the tools to do what you want: Just put the words in quotes if it really, really has to include it.
My beef with Google is it returns too many results. I get that by including similar words in the results we'll dramatically increase the number, but I really shouldn't get 1M results for many things I type. Anything after the first 100 or so is almost always completely irrelevant to what I was searching for.
In this particular case, perhaps just providing your own frontend that transforms the input to what you need with the settings you need probably will suffice. So make a form where this string:
Python aphorisms
"Python" "aphorisms"In which case it isn't relevant. I typed those words for a reason, any result not containing all three is not relevant by definition.
In other words, not a blanket 'the results for this query suck, but if I just stick my fingers in my ears and completely ignore one your words I get much nicer results so why don't I show you those?' - but a more intelligent presumption.
With, of course, the option to force the search to show specifically what you exactly searched for with no such helpful alternatives applied.
However, as of right now they only offer it for actual typos/spelling mistakes (like your example with the missing space) as opposed to semantically similar wordings.
I understand eliding articles and pronouns but when I'm searching for an exact string or you just completely ignore whole subjects and objects - what?
It may seem relevant to google but it's not to its users this is why people are upset. If the result was relevant no one would care that it didn't have the keyword, please listen to your users.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blacklist/jbpccand...
Google should just have a developer/engineer/expert mode that shows results using 2012 algorithms. I don’t mind paying $5/month in exchange.
Not kidding.
I guess a VPN could be a workaround, but does the average Joe know what a VPN is?
Next, remove content thieves like Pinterest entirely from the index.
Next, invest in recency + relevancy over just page reputation. A huge amount of high value recent content is written but it keeps losing against much worse old content which only ranks because it's old. As the typical example: the 15 year old Stackoverflow jQuery answer.
Invest in location awareness. Including location in your query gives laughable results.
Find a way to down rank sites gaming particular categories with shady tactics.